


Retrograde

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Community: trope_bingo, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-10
Updated: 2015-04-10
Packaged: 2018-03-22 04:53:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3715834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The grant money runs out eventually, and Carlos’s team have to go home. Home? Away from home? Away from Night Vale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Retrograde

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to Night Vale characters do not belong to me and I am making no money from this work of fan fiction.
> 
> Betaed by Q.
> 
> * * *

The grant money runs out eventually, and Carlos's team have to go home. Home? Away from home? Away from Night Vale.

Carlos, cast adrift, goes house-hunting. He starts with condos, but they're all out of his price range, and the agent gives him odd looks when he asks about their soul-sucking propensities. He has to switch to apartments. He also has to find apartments not agented by the same woman because she starts to cancel appointments as soon as she hears his name and he can feel the fear in her voice through the phone.

The apartments have cupboards and shelves and benches. They don't have designated bloodstone circle nooks, or ritual circles painted diligently in the center of the living room, Well, except for that one place, which the new agent hustles him out of, apologies dripping from his lips, ignoring how Carlos looks over his shoulder at runes that are familiar and strange all at once.

The new agent has a tan jacket. His briefcase does not buzz except with the vibration of his cell phone. He has a short brown moustache and bright blue eyes and one gold earring, like a pirate. Carlos could pick him out of a crowd, probably.

The apartments have kitchens where wheat has been prepared and consumed.

The apartments have balconies from which Carlos can see the city. He can see an Arby's. The Arby's does not have glowing lights over it aside from the regular old logo.

The bathrooms do not have 'decontamination bleach' beside 'hot' and 'cold' on the taps.

When he listens, quiet, eyes-closed quiet in the bedrooms, he can smell fresh paint and steam cleaned carpet and he cannot hear the voice that should be there. Not the Voice of Night Vale—

—and oh how he misses Cecil, misses him like the desert misses trucks and wooden crates—

—but the other voice, the feminine voice that belongs to no face, that tells him he should secure his wi-fi better, that she's eaten the last of his cheese, that he should consider yoga to calm his mind because his thoughts keep her up at night.

He calls the other members of his team, just to hear someone speak who isn't listing amenities (forget the elementary school zoning, ma'am; do the trees in that park, there, do they ever talk?).

They don't remember.

They don't remember.

They don't remember and, over time—weeks? months? he has to readjust to clocks that only go forward—Carlos stops remembering as well. 

The university finds them academic positions, solid researching supplemented with a little lecturing. Carlos dutifully goes in each day, driving from his apartment where the black mold in the kitchen doesn't form into mysterious sigils. He does science. He eats lunch in the cafeteria. He often eats pizza by the slice. It is not as good as—

But he can't remember. The dough base stops bothering him after the first week or two.

He does science again in the afternoon, or talks about it to a room full of students who have come to learn how to do science. They are polite when Carlos forgets, mid-sentence, which equation he's explaining, which principle he's demonstrating. They don't comment when his chalk screeches along the blackboard because the smell of chemicals from the laboratory next to the lecture theater has reached his nose at the wrong time, in the wrong combination.

Carlos forgets.

But sometimes he almost remembers, memories dancing moths just outside the candlelight circle of his consciousness. Sometimes he wakes with the memory of a hand in his, lips brushing against his, the warmth of another body beside his.

He adopts a cat. The cat does not have spines. It avoids the bathroom and any running water. But it's warm beside him at night. Its purring is soft and not jarring. After a month of feline ownership, Carlos can't remember why he ever thought it should be.

He does science and none of the measurements are ever strange.

He buys a breadmaker and makes wholewheat bread.

He stops startling every time he hears a helicopter.

He forgets why these things ever used to be odd.


End file.
